


and I won't hold that place dog-eared anymore

by basketofnovas (slashmarks)



Category: Fledgling - Octavia E. Butler
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 21:10:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5470871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashmarks/pseuds/basketofnovas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four years post-novel, Shori and her symbionts are finally moving into their own household. Celia tries to figure out what she wants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and I won't hold that place dog-eared anymore

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Assimbya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Assimbya/gifts).



> While there is no sex in this work, I would like to note that it explores relationships that involve dubious consent as is typical in canon. 
> 
> My recipient asked for an exploration of the symbionts' perspective, and of the weird and complicated consent issues. I hope I have delivered!
> 
> The title is from the lyrics of "Dryland" by Chris Pureka.

I.

 

Celia lies awake in bed.

Thoughts wash over her with the dull roar of the air conditioner. Shori. The Braithwaites. The trial. Stefan. Hugh.

She tries to piece it together. She's talked it over and thought it through too many times; it feels like the pieces have worn away in her mind, so they're too smooth for her to hold them. Is she remembering it properly? Theodora's death – that had to have been before the last day of the trial, because of what happened at the end, but was it in the middle or before it started?

She remembers Shori's face when she told her about Hugh – but she didn't, did she? Wasn't that Stefan?

She's mixing them up in her memory. Sometimes when she calls Stefan's face up in her mind, she sees him dark skinned like Shori. There's a smile Shori has when she's happy, when she's just fed off of Celia or she's watching her cook or just after sex. Celia thinks Stefan had it too, but she can't be sure.

She only has the one picture of him, the one she kept in her wallet. The rest were all in the house when it burned.

God.

Celia turns over. Her legs catch in the sheets and she kicks, violently, trying to get them off, trying to push off the feeling of being trapped. They fall off the bed, and the air conditioner blows on her bare skin.

Tomorrow they are flying to the new household Shori has built with her parents' money, with the help of Brook and Joel posing as her new legal guardians. It's been under construction for six months, since Shori decided she had spent enough time as a guest for a while.

Celia has wanted to go home since they started traveling. Since before. She's wanted to go home since she walked into Stefan's village and met burnt ashes and the smell of smoke, and found out her home was gone.

But it's not up to her, is it? It's up to Shori. There are pangs of resentment so often, little sparks that extinguish quickly because it _is_ Shori's money and Shori's dead parents and Shori's need to know about being Ina – and God, even if Shori's somehow older than Brook, Celia is still resenting an injured child for needing to recovery. She _knows_ better.

She tries to remember if she felt these sparks with Stefan and can't. She's been with Shori four years. In a month or two, it'll be as long as she was with Stefan.

A month or two after that and she will have been with Shori longer.

She wonders if that's a good thing or a bad thing or just... something. Will it be easier for her, when Stefan is just – her first love, a long time gone? When she's been with Shori twenty or fifty years? Or should she be jealous of Brook, who had Iosif for twenty-two years, as long as a human marriage might be expected to last?  _Her_ parents weren't together that long. Her mother got sick of the military moves and left her father, and then Celia got sick of her mother and left  _her_ . She had a mother for nineteen years and a father for fifteen and Stefan for four.

And then there's Brook again, whose father and little brother died. Do all Ina pick people like them? People with nothing to go back to?

Celia is not going to fall asleep like this, is she. Anyway the air conditioning on her skin is starting to make her shiver.

She goes over symbionts in her mind as she gets up and puts clothes on, people she knows and what she knows about their families. There's Joel, who chose the Ina. He lost a parent, but he was more or less destined for this since birth. His father is still with the Gordons. There's Wright, who wasn't exactly chosen, but doesn't seem to be close to his family. He's visited his uncle once, though.

Then there's the other symbionts of Shori's, who Celia privately thinks of the “new” symbionts even though they've been here for years. They just weren't there for the trial or the attacks. Renee was a foster child, no family to speak of. But then there's Tyrone, who visits his parents every year for Christmas and got Celia to come with him as his girlfriend last year – no way to introduce them to Shori, by the time she looks old enough to be anyone's girlfriend Tyrone will look far too young to visit anyone who knows his real age. 

At first, Celia felt guilty about Tyrone on some level, at first, not sure whether she was replacing Hugh or Stefan or which would be worse. Dating another symbiont of her Ina's was somehow different from casual sex. But she wants someone just like she wanted someone when she started with Hugh, and it's okay. So Shori says. So Stefan said.

Anyway, so there's Tyrone and Wright and Joel who all have family they still talk to out of the symbionts of Shori's. The last woman, Julia, her parents are dead, but not anything traumatic, just age. She was around fifty when Shori found her. Celia privately thinks Shori picked her because she reminded her of Theodora, but they're not very alike except at first glance.

She knows other symbionts, people whose numbers she kept from the Gordons and the Braithwaites and the others. Some with family, some without. It seems like there are way more symbionts without families than other humans, but how should she know what's normal?

She has shorts and a bra and a tank top on, which is all the house outside her air conditioned room is cool enough for. Her braids spill down her back and stick to her neck and shoulders uncomfortably. Celia pulls them up and ties them in a knot to keep them out of her way before she goes downstairs.

It's early afternoon, around one or two. Most of the household is asleep, but they don't run competely nocturnally like some Ina households, since Shori doesn't have to sleep during the day. When Celia lived with Stefan, the common areas would be deserted at this time, unless someone had just come back from a trip to visit relatives or do human tourist things during the day or something.

The upstairs lights are off, but she can hear voices behind Wright's door.

There's a loud moan and a gasp and she corrects herself with a smirk; she can hear sex noises, or maybe biting ones, behind Wright's door. She doesn't want to eavesdrop, so she starts down the stairs. Her bare feet are quiet on the hardwood.

There's a light on in the living room, but she turns left at the bottom of the stairs and goes into the kitchen instead. It's dark, as dark as a house can really get at two o'clock in the afternoon with all of the shades pulled. The dark kitchen is comforting. Cool and alone and safe. The kitchen is Celia's; other people use it, but she's the one who cooks the most, and she's the one who really knows how to cook, so she's in charge. She leans her head forehead against the wooden cabinet and breathes, slowly, trying to relax.

She'd like to cook. It would give her something to do, calm down her mind a little and let her sleep. She might have gotten out her guns to clean, but they've pretty much all been sent ahead with the heavy belongings, because flying with guns is a pain in the ass.

She's not really hungry, and most of the house is asleep. Wright might want food when he and Shori are done, if she's feeding on him, but most likely he'll just go to sleep.

There's someone in the living room, though, so Celia crosses the hall to find out if they're hungry. If not she'll bake, maybe, something for tomorrow morning. With seven people in the house, they can finish a cake or muffins or whatever in a few hours before they leave. The dishes belong to the guest house, so they aren't packed.

She finds Brook lying on the couch and reading. “Hey,” she says, sitting down, a little relieved. She likes the others okay, but she's known Brook the longest, and when she gets edgy Brook's good at not making it worse. Brook gets people like that.

“Afternoon.” Brook looks up from her book and smiles a little. “You're going to have trouble getting up with everyone else, you know.”

“You're awake too,” Celia says. She sits down across from Brook and fidgets. One of her braids is sliding out of the bun. She tries to tuck it back in, then when it doesn't work, pulls it out and twirls the end between her fingers.

“I couldn't sleep,” Brook says, watching her with an unreadable expression.

“Neither could I.” Celia pulls a knee up to her chest and watches Brook back.

The silence is comfortable, something Celia could sink into maybe, except she doesn't feel calm enough. She remembers she came in here for a reason. “Are you hungry?”

Brook regards her. “Not particularly, but if you're about to make something for tomorrow I could help.”

I could help, not I will help, not do you need help. Brook _is_ good at not making Celia more edgy. She decides company in the kitchen doesn't sound so bad, so she gets back up. “I was thinking cake, maybe.”

“To celebrate?” Brook asks, trailing her in.

“I guess.” Cake is more complicated than muffins or rolls, at least if you pick the right recipe, and she and pastries mutually loathe each other – she has never once had croissants turn out right – so she decided on cake without really thinking about it.

There's a recipe she's been wanting to try that should be good for breakfast. She stoops to start piling apples out of the bag in the bottom of the fridge. Apples keep a long time, so she left some in the refrigerator for the next guest house occupants. “Can you start peeling these?”

“Sure.” Brook takes them from her and gets set up at the cutting board by the sink.

Celia starts taking out wet ingredients first, checking the recipe off her phone to make sure she's remembering everything. They don't have any eggs in the house right now, so she glances over it, decides they're meant for the texture in this one, and adds a little more olive oil as the appropriate substitute.

She wants to talk to Brook. The realization creeps on her slowly, and it takes until she's done whisking together the wet ingredients and just remembering to preheat the oven to figure out something she wants to say.

“You knew Shori before all of this,” Celia says, straightening from the oven and going to get out the dry ingredients.

“So did you,” Brook says.

Apple peels drip from her fingers, all over the counter, like she's scattering flower petals, red roses maybe. God, Celia's tired, or maybe just moping, to think of something like that.

“Not really,” Celia says. She has a few other little tasks to finish – greasing the pan, putting together a mixture of butter and cinnamon – before she comes over to join Brook in preparing the apples. “I mean, I met her twice, neither time for all that long. You'd been... around... for half her life, though.” She shies away from bringing up Iosif; she still doesn't like talking about Stefan.

“True.” Brook frowns at the apples. “I wouldn't say I knew her well, but they did visit.”

Brook stays quiet until they're done peeling apples and have to start chopping them up, but she's just thinking. Celia doesn't have to actually ask it, which she's kind of grateful for.

“She hasn't changed that much,” Brook says eventually. “Not in personality. She was always confident of being in charge. I think...”

Quiet, again, while the knives thud into the cutting board, until Brook says, “I don't remember her needing to be scolded about how she treated her symbionts – you should remember Kris, at least, and how happy he was with her – but I wouldn't have wanted to be hers, then. She was very much an adolescent Ina. She looks to us for guidance much more than most of them do, because she has such little experience of the world.”

Celia does remember Kris. She pops one of the sour apple pieces into her mouth for an excuse for the way her eyes suddenly water, and closes them, trying to hold the tears back.

She hadn't dated Kris like she had Hugh, but they'd been friends, and they'd had sex. He'd been ecstatically happy with Shori, she remembers that. She wonders how Shori had found him. Celia had never asked.

“Celia,” Brook starts to say.

Celia doesn't answer. She takes slow breaths, trying to keep the grief from turning to rage. Brook's knife keeps working on the apples; she never stops, and Celia slowly opens her eyes again.

“Are you happy with her?” she asks. “I mean, this wasn't what you expected...”

“I'm happy now.” Brook shrugs. “About her, I don't now, but someday I will be. I'm happier than I would be if I was passed off to a stranger, or if I died with Iosif.”

“I guess,” Celia says. Her fingers are clenched around the paring knife's handle. She has to unwind them with difficulty before she can go back to the apples.

“It's strange, sometimes,” Brook says eventually. “They don't think of us as partners, exactly, but it's how we have to think of them, the way we're set up. I thought of myself as a sort of... stepmother to her, and now...”

“Yeah,” Celia says quietly. “You parent her, a little. I've noticed.” She always figured that someone has to, because Shori might act like a little adult Ina but she doesn't know things like to touch her symbionts when they're upset or how often she needs to feed, until they tell her.

Celia's glad Brook does it; she's not sure she could.

“I'm glad she doesn't seem to mind it,” Brook says.

The apples are done. Celia pulls the bowl of wet ingredients over to start dumping them in. “The rest of it's basically a one person job,” she says.

“I'll watch until you're done, if you don't mind,” Brook tells her, and sits down at the table.

Later, when the cake is out of the oven and Celia goes back upstairs, the house is quiet. When she flicks out the light in the hall, the house is dark.

 

II.

 

Before, they lived in Washington. The Gordons were in California. Between California and now, they've lived everywhere: the east coast, the deep south, Montana, Canada, even England for six months. None of the households have been in the city, exactly, but some places are further away than others; the Ina household in Montana was an hour long drive from the closest small town. In England there's pretty much nowhere without people.

Their last guest stay was in Georgia, about a half hour from Atlanta by car. Relatively convenient, especially for Ina, but none of them made a lot of trips out to the city; they had everything they needed..

Shori's parents owned property a lot of places. They end up back in the Pacific Northwest, but in British Columbia across the border. It's not so far from California that things will be difficult for the Gordons when Shori is mated, and Wright and Joel can visit their families, but it isn't right in the middle of the places Shori's family – Celia and Brook's family – was murdered.

The thing Celia discovers, along with everyone else, is that making a new Ina household is a lonely business. In every other place they've lived, there have been five or six Ina at least, with at least thirty or forty symbionts, plus assorted employees and the symbionts' children and spouses. Here, there's just the eight of them: Shori plus seven.

Celia is used to not working – isn't that a thought that would confuse the hell out of her ten years ago, but it's true. She worked in the kitchen because she loved it, and she read and went shooting, and spent time with Stefan and time at the symbionts' parties. Mostly it was always that last thing; people to visit with, dance with, talk to, have sex with. There aren't a lot of people here.

They're close enough to Vancouver to go as much as she wants. Celia goes every few days. Joel, who is used to the Gordons' small town, goes with her. Sometimes the others join them.

Celia grocery shops – that's her main excuse for the trips, because keeping food in a house for seven adults is no small matter – and goes to the library for herself and with arm long lists for the others. Once Joel helps her with the paperwork so she's allowed to own her guns in Canada, she goes to shooting ranges again. She goes to the beach every day for all of August, because even if the water is kind of cold it's nice to swim and remember what daylight feels like. Sometimes she does other, touristy things like visiting museums and display gardens and Stanley Park and mostly window shopping at Granville Island.

She also goes clubbing kind of a lot.

At first she mostly hangs around the bar, uncomfortably ordering soda and virgin drinks, because she had to drive back to unload the groceries first so it's late enough most of the crowd is drunk, and she thinks she might actually be the only black woman in the bar, and she feels really, really exposed.

She's lived in this area of the world for years, since she was a teenager brought along with her dad's last army move, and she was used to, well, sticking out, before she left. But she's coming from A city where more than half of the residents were black, and before _that_ she's coming from England, where people treated her like a freaking walking zoo exhibit, and she figures that's enough to make anyone shy.

So there are racist assholes in America – in Canada, okay – too, yeah. So she might run into one. She's still permanently escaped London and is never going back there in her life if she has anything to say about it – not that she does, if Shori decides she wants to visit, but Shori got it at least as bad as her and Joel so she doesn't think it's real likely. (And there's the resentment again; if _Shori_ decides to visit.) But the point is, she's home again and she's going to be okay.

She tries out a variety of locations; Davie Street for when she wants to dance with girls, Surrey for when she wants to stick out in a slightly different way. Ultimately it doesn't matter much; she's not going home with any of these people. All she wants is to dance, to remember what it's like to have people she doesn't know around.

Sometimes she pretends she might, though, that she's a college student or something looking for a boyfriend or a girlfriend to kiss, date, someday live with. Sometimes she pretends her choices aren't already made and she's someone who might marry the girl with the gold glasses and the beads or the guy with the dreadlocks someday.

Joel doesn't go with her every time she goes out clubbing, but he goes a lot of the time, and it's one of those times when she's driving both of them home at two AM – bed time for the other club goers, lunch time for them – and she's high on the feeling of dancing for hours and he's kind of tipsy, and he says something about having everything he wanted.

“Everything?” she says, caustically. Unfairly caustically, but she spent two hours dancing with the same guy tonight and felt guilty about giving him a fake phone number because she knows she'd _want_ to date him and she doesn't want to suck him into her world. “What about choices?”

“You know I always wanted this,” he says, leaning into the window and staring into the dark. “Didn't you?”

“I wanted Stefan,” she says, and concentrates very hard on not crying so her view of the road won't be blocked.

Joel forgets all about it, or pretends he does, by the time they get home. Celia goes straight to the shower and then back downstairs to the kitchen when she's done.

Someone made sandwiches for lunch, the kind of thing they don't need her or anyone knowledgeable for. They're in a pile under plastic wrap in the dining room. Celia frowns a little, because _someone_ should know how to cook other than her, they're all adults, but Brook can, she just doesn't really enjoy it. Celia's been teaching Tyrone to help her, too.

Speaking of Brook, she's in the kitchen doing dishes when Celia goes to put together a marinade for the steak she's planning for dinner.

Celia's braids are air drying from her shower; she disentangles the larger braids she put them in for the shower absently with one hand as she wants for the counter to clear, and thinks about changing her hairstyle. It isn't really hot here, even in the summer half the time, and certainly not September. The dampness of her hair seeps into her shirt and feels like it permeates her skin, making her shiver. Maybe she could cut her hair, wear it in a short afro or something.

“Sorry, I'm in your way,” Brook says absently.

“No problem,” Celia says, perched on the kitchen table. It looks like mostly breakfast dishes, a few that might be from the sandwiches. “Do you want help?”

Brook clears a space for her. The conversation, or more like half conversation, from the car is still in her head, so she says, “Do you ever think about leaving?”

“We can't,” Brook says reasonably, scrubbing pancake batter out of a bowl.

“I know.” Celia is wiping off plates. There will be a dishwasher in this house eventually, but she isn't sure when eventually is. “But do you ever daydream about it?”

“Not really,” Brook says after a pause. “I wanted this life, you know, as much as I wanted Iosif.”

“Yeah,” Celia says, and doesn't bring up the things she knows about Brook.

“You do,” Brook says.

She shrugs. “Not, like, seriously. There was a guy at the club tonight, is all. I was thinking about him.”

“So ask him out,” Brook says.

“I don't know.” The last of the dishes are done. Celia wipes her hands off and fidgets with her braids while she thinks about what kind of marinade she should make for the steaks. “I mean, I have sex with guys sometimes, but what am I going to tell him if it works out? Come meet my vampire mistress and six co-spouses?”

Brook laughs, but she says, “People do it.”

“I guess,” Celia says. “Most of us marry other symbionts, though.”

“Not everyone, but that's an option, too. I thought you and Tyrone...?”

“Sort of.” Celia shrugs. “I'm not sure he's really my type, for good, I mean.”

She wanted him to be her type, because that would be simple, and she really does want kids, but ultimately, no.

There's something tugging at the back of her head, and she says, “Hey, aren't doctors supposed to be able to help with the addiction?”

Stefan told her that, when she got together with him. He knew how she'd fidget and pace with no exit.

“I've never heard of anyone doing it,” Brook says, slowly. “I'd think if it was possible, I'd know at least a friend of a friend.”

“If they know it's possible, someone had to have,” Celia says.

“The psychological addiction, I guess,” Brook says.

Celia hates to be told she can't do things; even this makes her bristle. “Sure, if you're already craving it by the time you know you need something,” she says, carefully avoiding her memories, carefully avoiding the reason most symbionts end up dying from addiction, their own experiences. “But I bet if you went and talked to a doctor _before_ that...”

“If you want to leave,” Brook starts, quietly. “Do you want me to talk to her for you?”

“No,” Celia says, irrationally stung, and goes to get the steak sauce. “I didn't mean...”

“What did you mean?” Brook says, but it isn't unkind.

“Just a thought,” Celia says, and thinks instead of no, _not yet_.

 

III.

 

Celia is cleaning her guns, all over the dining room table because there isn't enough space on the card table in the kitchen. She's getting grease on the tablecloth but it's okay, because the tablecloth is splattered in spaghetti sauce from an upset at dinner last night, so it has to be washed today anyway.

Shori is sitting across from her, reading. She tilts it up for a second and Celia sees that it's a textbook on folklore that Celia mentioned last week, when they were talking about werewolf legends.

Celia feels a sudden, totally unexpected rush of affection for Shori. She catches herself wondering, if she leaves ( _when she leaves_ ) if she can visit, stay in contact with Brook and Wright and Tyrone and Shori, too. It's really just the trapped feeling she hates, not _them_ , not being Shori's.

Granted, without the venom in her system she probably won't be into someone who looks maybe ten, and isn't _that_ a disturbing thought.

“Hey, Shori,” she says. “What do you think of the book?”

“It's interesting,” Shori says. “Especially the discussion of related tales. I wonder – I've only heard of one version of the Ina legends. It seems odd.”

“We haven't talked to that many Ina,” Celia says, thinking about it. “You're supposed to live all over the middle east and Asia and Africa too, right? And we just know your parents' friends, people who speak English. Maybe there are five or six other stories we haven't heard.”

“Perhaps.” Shori closes the book. “I could ask if anyone's heard of other stories, if you're curious.”

This is what she likes about Shori: the way she follows Celia's tangents without making her feel like she's a child being indulged. They talked about how you could turn a human into an Ina once, like Celia used to wish, and even though Shori said right at the front that she thought it sounded very strange, they got into genetic engineering and physiological differences and went and got Julia who was a doctor before she retired into it, and spent almost four hours on the subject. Shori doesn't patronize; Celia guesses she doesn't remember enough to feel like she can.

She still kind of does wish she could become Ina; that would solve her problems, wouldn't it? She could be Shori's sister instead of her symbiont, start her own household and live practically-forever right along with her, and then she wouldn't feel so trapped.

Of course, if she was Ina she'd be just as tied down to the family, but... she doesn't really want to leave again, uproot herself one more time, either.

“You and my brother,” Shori says, softly, hesitantly.

“What?” Celia says, jerked completely out of her train of thought.

Shori is looking at the cover of the book. “I haven't wanted to ask in case it would hurt you, but it's as if he never existed to me, except for that one day. Can you tell me about him?”

Shit, she probably should have thought about that earlier. “Sure,” Celia says, slowly. The gun parts in her hands give her a place to start: “I taught him to shoot, did I ever tell you about that?”

Shori didn't know, so Celia repeats it and goes into it, how much of a headache it was to find somewhere to practice safely at night and how excited she was to find out there was something _she_ could give _Stefan_ and the time they ran into a white supremacist jerk at the shooting range and Stefan scared him off by lifting the back of his truck up with one hand.

Then there are other stories, about how they started dating, about meeting Iosif and his other symbionts, and a thousand other little things she'd almost forgotten. Every day stories, the kind you build up when you know someone so well, about family. She finds she can remember the smell of his skin and the way he smiled, just a little bit different from Shori – he had a crease in his chin – and it's too much.

She talks for hours, Shori asking questions sometimes, and cries twice, and at the end of it all she's not sure what to do, or what to think, except that Shori asks Celia to teach her to shoot, too, so the next day they go to the range.

Celia knows most of the people who are at the range a lot, and she introduces Shori as her little sister in the front, before they put ear protection on. She gives Shori instructions and repeats them twice for the benefit of the listeners, even knowing Shori will remember everything she said perfectly. Then she makes her repeat them twice, enjoying the little annoyed crinkle in her nose.

They can't really talk once they're out on the range, so it's just Celia helping Shori position her hands on the guns with her own, bracing her because even if Shori's the strongest person Celia knows, she's way too tiny to resist the kickback very well. Shori is unfairly, Ina good with reflexes and senses and angles once she works out what she's doing, but she isn't perfect. Celia sees her grin vividly when she hits the center of the target and thinks that she can't wait until Shori gets good enough to do that all of the time, and then rocks back on her heels, a little startled.

Six months, a year maybe? Ina pick up skills fast, but not instantaneously. Celia finds she wants to be there when Shori does.

They get out of the range and change clothes and wash up in the car. Celia isn't really sure whether lead poisoning applies to Ina and symbionts, but it's good safety practice to do it anyway. She remembers to kiss Shori's hair and not her lips when she hugs her in congratulations.

They go home. Celia isn't sure _what_ she wants.

She can see the future stretching out in front of her: teaching Tyrone to cook and Shori to shoot, reading her way through the Vancouver public library, watching some new Ina, Shori's adoptive sister, move in and getting to know her symbionts.

At the same time, she can see an alternate future, one where she's gone. One where she walks away and gets married to someone she doesn't have to share and who wouldn't think about sharing her, and has kids and lives in a city – she's decided she likes cities – and has her own life. Her own choices. A future where leaving doesn't mean medical treatment and detoxing from her lover's venom and asking permission.

An open future, one that isn't bound to an iron route like a train track.

She doesn't know.

 

Everything feels oddly fragile.

She watches Wright and Renee play video games in the living room and thinks that it might be the last time. She teaches Tyrone the others' favorite recipes, then tests them on cooking them correctly, telling herself they'll need to be able to cook when Celia goes to visit her cousins in Seattle anyway. She catches herself mentally hanging curtains, thinking about what color they should paint the kitchen and living room, whether she wants wallpaper in her room or if she should just start picking out posters to cover the plaster, and then she has to stop.

She isn't sure, anymore, that she _wants_ to leave. But maybe she needs to. She needs something.

Moments with Shori are sometimes fraught. They go out to practice shooting every few weeks, and Shori will hang around while she runs errands. Celia shows her the touristy places she went when she first moved in; Shori thinks the novelty tea sets in the cooking store are funny.

Neither of them are that into museums, but one day there's an exhibit on West Africa in one of them and they go.

“My name's West African,” Shori says suddenly, halfway down a hallway. “Brook told me. Do you know where my human mother was from?”

Celia starts to answer before realizing she can't. She didn't know Shori's human mother, for all they lived in the same town.

She feels obscurely guilty. Celia will never know where her parents' parents' were from, before slavery, and that can't be helped, but Shori should know. Shori's mother... Celia thinks she was an immigrant. That information isn't lost. Or wasn't lost, a few years ago.

“We can look up your name,” Celia says, long minutes later, while they stand in front of the glass cases. “Ask someone at the library, maybe, the internet's crap for name meanings. If we can find out the language, that will tell us something. And maybe there will be different naming traditions or something. I think Brook knows your mother's name, too, she might even still have family...”

“Maybe,” Shori says quietly.

It will take months, years to find out. Celia wonders if she'll still be there.

That night, Shori feeds from her. Celia strokes her hair after they're done and feels like she's lying.

“I've been thinking about leaving,” she whispers into Shori's hair, hoping she's asleep. Hoping she won't hear.

There are long moments when Celia thinks she is, and then Shori says, “I thought it might be something like that.”

“Oh,” Celia says. She tries to stay calm, but her heart is racing like she's running a marathon, or like she's staring down her gun at a human, the way she's only done once in her life before.

“There's a doctor,” Shori says eventually. “Brook suggested I bite him, because he could be useful if someone gets hurt here, until we have one of our own. He's a specialist in blood problems. If you want, I can take you to see him...”

“Oh,” Celia says again, and turns to face the wall.

She doesn't know what she wants. She doesn't know what she expected Shori to say, besides – not this.

Ina are supposed to be possessive. Ina _are_ possessive. Losing a symbiont is almost as bad as dying to them.

Celia wonders if losing one because they leave is as bad as losing one to death; wonders how much she'll be hurting Shori if she goes. She was afraid that Shori would be angry, but now that she's told her and Shori isn't, she feels oddly hurt. Insecure. She sighs. It doesn't really matter. Whether Shori is angry or not, whether Shori is hurt by it or not...

She loves Shori. This isn't really about Shori at all; it's about choice.

“I don't want you to go,” Shori says.

Celia freezes, waiting. Wondering if an order is coming; if she's missed the last chance to get off the train.

“But it's up to you.” Shori sighs and stretches out, putting an arm loosely on Celia's waist. “I want you to be here, with me and everyone else, because you're mine, and I love you. I'm afraid of you leaving, and I'm afraid that something will go wrong and you'll – be hurt, or maybe—” she doesn't finish that sentence. “I'm afraid,” she says again. “But if you want to go, I'll do my best to help you.”

Celia closes her eyes and says, “I don't know,” and it's a complete answer for now.

She might leave. Someday.

The future is open. She doesn't know.

But she isn't leaving now.


End file.
